The Grey Man

by S. R. Crockett

He gave the brown rosary into my hand, and I turned it curiously about. It was made of the stones of some foreign fruit, most quaintly and fantastically carven and joined together with little links of gold. Between two of the beads there was a longer portion of the chain, and upon it two rings of gold were strung.

'Once,' said the Dominie, 'there was a maid who had promised to share my hearth. One ring of these two was mine, to wear upon my finger, and one was hers. Upon the night before our marriage day we met at our place of tryst. I tried the ring upon her finger ard wished her to wear it that night. 'To-morrow will serve—it is not so far away!' she said, and slipped from my arms. Under a new-risen moon she went homeward, singing by the heads of Benane. And that was the last that these eyes ever beheld of bonny Mary Torrance—save only this necklace of beads which she wore, and the stain of her blood upon the short grass of the seashore.'

The Dominie looked long to seaward at the flashing birds that circled and clanged about our rocky isle, each tribe of them following its own orbit and keeping to its own airy sphere.

'And what happened to her?' I began, but got no further.

'Murder, most foul,' he cried, rising to his feet in his agitation, 'horrible, unheard of in any kingdom! For all about the spot where these things were found, was the trampling of many naked feet. And some of these were small and some were great. But all were naked, and the print of every foot was plain upon the sand of the shore. Each footprint had the toes of the bare feet wide and distinct. Every toe was pointed with a claw, as though the steads were those of birds. And the fearsome beast-prints went down to the sea edge, and the blood marks followed them. And that was all.' Then the Dominie fell silent, and I also, for though Ayrshire was full of blood feuds and the quest of human life, this was a new kind of murder to me—though by all accounts it seemed not rare in the neighbourhood of Benane, for I minded the warning words of the Mistress of Chapeldonnan.

'And had she no enemies, this Mary Torrance?' I asked.

'She was but young, and of birth too lowly for feuds and fightings. Besides, who in Carrick would harm a maid going homeward from her love-tryst?'

The Dominie rose and walked away to the other side of the Rock of Ailsa, where for long he sat by himself and fingered the necklace of beads. His face was fixed, as if he were making of the rosary a very catena of hate, a receptacle of dark imaginings and vengeful vows. Scarcely could I recognise my quaint and friendly Dominie.

It was that night, as the blackness grew grey towards the morn, that I yielded my watch upon the roof of the little Castle of Ailsa to the Dominie. Too long I had paced the battlements, listening to the confused and belated yawping and crying of the sea-birds upon the ledges, and to the mysterious night sounds of the isle. For I began to hear and to see all manner of uncouth things, that have no existence except on the borderlands of sleep.

The Dominie said no word, good or bad, but drew his cloak about him and sat down on the rampart. I bade him good morning, but he never answered me a word; and so I left him, for I judged that his thought was bitter, and that the tale he had told me of Mary Torrance lay blackly upon him.